​If our reality is the mere product of matter and energy interacting over vast stretches of time, the qualities we and the universe possess should be fully attributable to those agents.

And the materialist has confidence that this is so. After all, if there's a question about why a bulldozer works, just start disassembling it into its gears, nuts, and bolts until the answer emerges. Such experience with human-made devices is then extrapolated to apply to everything in nature. For example, to understand how the body works, it's dissected to its smallest components. This reductionist approach is central in today's sciences of anatomy, physiology, histology, cytology, and biochemistry.

Practical successes with examining parts and pieces have brought us great technological advances and created confidence that all answers will lie within the components of matter.

However, break things down far enough and a problem emerges. For example, there is nothing about the iron atoms in the bulldozer that would explain how the bulldozer works, why it's broken, or what made it. Similarly, the atoms in color pigments don't explain the design and beauty that emerges from a painting or flower. There's nothing about hydrogen and oxygen that would predict the properties of water when they combine as H2O. Nor is there anything within the nature of atoms that would suggest, or even hint at a fully functioning human. In fact, the proton in the hair growing on your kneecap is identical to the proton in the door handle on your car.

At the atomic level, atoms simply obey natural laws that make their behavior perfectly predictable. (I am not ignoring quantum uncertainty, which will be addressed later in the book.) Obedient atoms are what allow chemists to mix a batch of certain atoms and molecules together to produce plastic food wrap and count on not getting Coca-Cola coming out of the extruder.

Atoms, or parts of atoms, don't have little engineering drawings in their hip pockets describing how to build a bulldozer, flower, painting, human, frog, or aardvark. Nor do atoms have the free will to choose to assemble in such complex functional ways. They are bound by law, they aren't free and creative.

There's clearly a missing factor between elemental pieces of matter and the higher-level complicated and functionally ordered qualities that we see in our reality. The intelligent painter's choices, not atoms, are the cause of the beauty in a painting. The intelligent engineer's choices, not atoms, are responsible for the functional complexity and feats of a bulldozer.

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​But materialists attempt to rebut this with determinism, a philosophy that denies will and argues that materialistic forces cause all things.

Consider how they reason on a coin toss. They say that subtleties in the way the coin is held, the laws governing the forces from your thumb, air currents, barometric pressure, humidity, and symmetry of the coin all determine exactly what will turn up with each flip. If the forces acting upon the coin were calculated, heads or tails could be predicted every time.

Prompted by confidence that atom-to-man evolution is true, materialists take this reasoning a gigantic step further and claim the same determinism applies to all things, including us and the choices we make. They contend that every particle in your body, every action you take, and your existence could be explained if one were long-winded and smart enough to detail the history of every atom and how the laws of the universe affected them. To determinists, we are nothing more than biological robots.

By this reasoning, the entire history and future of the universe would be locked in, determined, with no surprises. All of our actions would be just an effect of underlying chemical reactions that are the inevitable end result of a long chain of other chemical collisions, all interlinked and cascading from one to the other since the Big Bang. If one atom anywhere since the beginning of time would have been in a different spot, that would have impacted all other atoms through time and I would not now be me writing these words and you would not be you reading them. So the story goes.

At first glance, particularly to the materialistically minded, determinism seems a reasonable sort of thing since the motions of the planets, the speed of an apple falling from a tree, and the strength of the steel necessary to hold up a bridge are all determined and predicted by matter and natural laws.

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They then extrapolate from this (materialists' and evolutionists' favorite form of illogic) that we are no different than the planets, apples, and bridges. All thought, which they claim is supposedly the result of the particular atoms a person has in their brain, would be the mere consequence of atoms interacting with each other since the Big Bang. Therefore, there would be no free will that could violate this progression of inexorable forces. Assuming all thought comes from matter in the brain, atoms would not be choosing, any more than blacktop atoms on roadways have a choice of whether to get excited and generate heat when exposed to the sun, or a ball set atop an elevated plank decides whether to roll downhill or not.

However, determinism is demolished by the existence of free will. Unlike atoms, molecules, and other material things that blindly obey natural laws, we can choose among endless options. Will (choice) is the antithesis of blind obedience to law.

Granted, many of our day-to-day acts, particularly in our modern world of consumerism and obedience, may seem reactive, deterministic, even robotic. We eat, sleep, don or shed clothes depending on the weather, and move to sexual urges. But, clearly, at any point in this flow of life, we can make choices.

Further complicating matters for determinists are the collectives of people in nation-states, religions, and society that settle on the same ideologies, and ontologies. From a materialistic stance, it's not possible to explain how the atoms in various brains, all having unique histories since the Big Bang, settle upon the same beliefs.

It's a self-evident fact assumed by virtually all of humanity that we have free will. It's embedded in language with hundreds of words and phrases, such as choosing, choice, deciding, decision, ambivalence, quandary, uncertainty, freedom, latitude, leeway, liberty, prerogative, dilemma, adjudge, guess, waver, unsettle, prefer, discriminate between, and so on. If materialists have their way and eradicate free will, languages worldwide would have to be purged of all such words indicating choice. Replacing all the deletions would be one word, compulsion, and its derivatives. Moreover, all the millions of non-fiction writings in stores and libraries with references to choices and deciding would have to be moved over to the fiction aisles.

This practical implication highlights the absurdity of denying free will. But materialists/evolutionists must nevertheless hold to their denial. And no, it's not because of science or sound thinking, as they attempt to have us believe. First off, they know that free will would nullify their metaphysical faith that atoms and energy are an ultimate explanation of reality, since, as explained above, atoms don't choose. It would also mean the free choice to believe in materialistic evolution would prove that materialistic evolution cannot be true.

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​Compounding the logical and practical sinkhole that results from denying free will is the ethical dilemma. Ethics cannot be derived from atoms no matter how they interact. This, combined with the materialistic evolutionary doctrine of survival of the fittest, not only sets the stage for amorality but brutal competitiveness as well.

In a world absent free will, no dastardly deed could be prosecuted since people would just be under the force of dog-eat-dog evolution and the brain's forced obedience to the laws of chemistry and physics. Courtrooms and prisons would be empty since nobody could logically be held accountable for their actions. Every manner of behavior could be deterministically justified. This is actually creeping into our judicial system which is peopled with lawyers and lawyer-judges schooled in materialism, evolution, and determinism.

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​Such dire consequences signal wrong premises, just like the horrors visited upon mankind by the church-state through millennia are due to wrong premises. Wrong ideas create wrong results.

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​Materialists and evolutionists who wish to retain their faith and convert others must explain away these socially destructive implications. So, they cite secular humanism, a doctrine of acceptable ethics not unlike the basic precepts of most religions and what can be derived from one's own conscience. Secular humanism, through unintelligible convoluted reasonings, is intended to rein in the logical consequences of denying free will, deterministic atoms, and evolution.

Free will can only be reasonably questioned if, as a starting point, materialistic evolution is presumed true. Moreover, since free will demands something other than matter to account for it, like soul or spirit, and that smacks of religion, it's dismissed out of hand. But since evolution is not true, and human-made religions have nothing to do with soul or spirit, entertaining the notion that we don't freely make choices, is, at best, silly, like denying the self-evident nose on our face. (The overwhelming evidence of mind extraneous to matter—and having nothing to do with human-made religions—is further developed in coming chapters.)

In spite of the obvious, intelligentsia who assume that atom-to-man evolution is true—but can't even begin to prove it--choose to create volumes of incomprehensible philosophic verbosity justifying their atheism and materialism by denying free will. If you're in the mood for a headache, search "does free will exist" on the Internet and see the tortuous paths traveled in desperate search of any morsel to support cherished materialistic belief and faith.

The denial of free will also has the bonus of supporting materialists' anti-religious stance since choice is integral to religious moral codes, redemption, salvation, and so on. But as will be shown in coming chapters, human-made religions have nothing to do with whether we have free will or not.

In the previous chapters, evolution is shown to not only be not true, it can't be. Thus, the very natural laws materialists deify, disprove materialistic evolution, the essential underpinning for their denial of free will. Materialists/evolutionists cannot honestly say that natural laws negate free will, and then ignore those laws when it comes to explaining how life came to be in the first place.

The reality of free will stands and demands other, other than matter, other than natural law. The prospect that we are "other," something beyond the reach of microscopes and test tubes, is just not something the materialist-evolutionist-atheist mind can tolerate.

Nor can they tolerate the inevitable conclusion that something other than matter would have to account for our free will: That sufficient cause would have to be the intelligence and free will of a nonmaterial Creator.

Keep in mind that no religious predisposition is required for this logic. Nor does concluding that an intelligence underlies our reality substantiate any human-made religion or holy book. We're simply permitting truth, to the degree we can know it, to speak to us.

On the other hand, materialistic evolutionists can set about proving, by actual science, not just nonsensical philosophy, that free will can be traced to atoms. But that has not only never been done, it can't be since atoms are perfectly obedient servants to locked natural laws.

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Introduction1. Rules for Finding Truth2. Truth Is Real and Accessible3. Origin Choices4. The Laws of Thermodynamics5. The Law of Information6. The Law of Impossibility7. The Law of Biogenesis8. The Laws of Chemistry9. The Law of Time10. Fossil Problems11. Have Humans Evolved?12. Are We Selected Mutants?13. Favorite Evolutionist Proofs14. Why Evolution Is Believed15. Free Will Proves Creation16. Design17. Biological Machines18. Nuts, Bolts, Gears, and Rotors Prove Intelligent Design19. Humans Defy Evolution20. The Anthropic Universe21. Evolution’s Impact22. Putting Religion on the Table23. How Religion Begins and Develops24. Religions Cross Pollinate25. Gods Writing Books26. Questionable Foundations of Christianity27. How Best to Measure Holy Books28. The Ultimate Holy Book Test29. Religion Unleashed30. End(s) of the World31. Defending Holy Books32. Faith33. The Source of Goodness34. Matter is an Illusion35. Weird Things Disprove Materialism36. Even Weirder Things37. Creature Testimony38. Personal Weirdness39. Proving Weird Things40. Skeptics and Debunkers41. Free Will Proves We Are Other42. Mind Outside Matter43. Death is a Return44. Life After Death45. Why There is Suffering46. The Creator47. Thinking’s Destination$1 Million Reward

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